Making An Effort
by razor840
Summary: Maybe he was looking for people who couldn't hide. She looks human." Written for the House Femslash ficathon over on LJ. This veers away from S4 Canon, obviously. First time writing femslash or a rare pair, hope you don't hate it.


She's tired when she comes home. She looks sad. Someone died, a mistake was made, it could be anything. Even some perceived slight or shortcoming might cause her to shut off. I can tell by the way she kisses me while holding the refrigerator door open with her hip. I can tell by the way she looks longingly at the files she brought home. She's probably been up for over twenty four hours at this point, the nursing staff at PPTH was on strike. She was sullen when I last saw her, probably viewing the whole thing as a personal failure. I don't really know.

When I was trying to get Chase to help me during the Stark case, I told him that Cameron's motives were uninteresting. Now that I've known her, had sex with her, practically lived with her for a couple of weeks, I keep going back to that conversation.

I can't tell now. I can't tell if I actually played her, or if she knew what I was doing but she just couldn't help herself. She seemed distracted but when I mentioned the questionable way in which House was handling the case, she did what I wanted her to do. I wondered how many times she'd failed to stop him, how many times he'd effortlessly shaken her faith in people, in doing the 'right' thing, whatever that was. She couldn't help herself. I don't know if that is a good thing or some kind of horrible character flaw, it might be a mixture of both. It turned out that she was right, we did kill the patient and I never thought that would happen. I've found that dealing with House's former flunkies was almost as difficult as dealing with him. Everyone had their guard up, and it seemed like they all had a million neuroses.

We get into bed but it seems obvious that while she should pass out immediately, that isn't going to happen. I run my hand down her back and her muscles feel almost unnaturally tight. I press my fingertips into the back of her neck and it feels like trying to push into concrete. She sucks in air through clenched teeth, I can barely hear a whisper of a moan in the back of her throat. She doesn't like to show weakness but tonight, she reaches back and runs a hand over my thigh. I can't imagine what she'd do if I wasn't here, she'd probably run on the treadmill for an hour until she could pass out. She might have fallen asleep at the kitchen table, her head resting on the files she brought home.

She rolls over and I straddle her hips. She seems smaller for some reason. I work to loosen up her back and neck muscles. I press on a spot between her shoulder blades and she yelps in pain, but quickly begs me not to stop. Afterward, We cuddle up next to each other. She's smiling and running her fingers through my hair.

"Sometimes the things we do have no significance at all. Sometimes a symptom isn't a symptom. I don't know how House deals with that, I find that hard to deal with and I'm not half as obsessive as he is," I've come to associate House with some of Allison's more morose moods.

"I don't know, you're pretty obsessive."

"I told him one time, I was angry, and I told him that I wasn't messed up. I told him how easy it was for me to open up to another human being."

"Could he tell that you were lying?"

"I don't know, probably."

"Maybe it was one of those situations where you thought that wishing might make it so."

She wants sex. Her hand is already under my shirt, tracing little patterns on my stomach. She's done talking. She's pinning my wrists down, licking and gently nipping at the nape of my neck. I need to get her to stop doing that. I hate going to work with hickeys, like a teenager. It tickles, it feels good, she feels warm. I was expecting sharp elbows, sharp hip bones grinding against me the first time, but she knew what she was doing. Sometimes I have to remind her that sex is supposed to be fun. Sometimes she's so focused on success, on giving me an orgasm, that she forgets to relax. She forgets that she's having sex, not attempting to facilitate some kind of complicated surgical procedure. She doesn't seem like she's really there, with me. I worry about that.

"Allison," she looks up at me warily, her eyes seem luminescent in the half light.

"You're tired," it goes against everything I'm feeling to stop her but it seems like everything is physical, the complete lack of intimacy is glaring and she's just trying to ignore it.

"You're not in the mood right now?"

"It just seems obvious that something might be bothering you. We've talked about this," I'd only really been able to scrounge up information on her professional life, which I had intended to use to my advantage in snagging one of House's fellowship positions.

I had her pegged as a bleeding heart and bleeding hearts are usually easy to manipulate, so I tucked that little piece of information away in case I ever needed it. Obviously she had a thing for House, otherwise, why would she have come back?

"I'm getting fired. It has to be coming. Why do you think the nurses went on strike?"

"Please tell me you're not that egotistical," now and again, shell say something so megalomaniacal that I'll start to worry.

"I read their demands, I was privy to the details of the negotiations. I should have seen this coming. I've had problems with this in the past you know, but my naiveté has been the cause of mass numbers of deaths before," someone died, got it in one.

She's still idly tracing little patterns below my navel with her fingernails, occasionally dipping them under the waist band of my pajama pants. She looks resigned but not crestfallen, like she's intimately familiar with the concept of defeat, the concept of failure but still stubbornly refusing to give up. I already know she's going to work tomorrow. I wonder if working for House does that to you, or if she was like that before.

"Why did you quit?"

"I told you," she's already carefully modulating her voice, gauging the correct level of nonchalance, and I already know she's lying.

"You didn't tell me the truth though. It wasn't because of Chase, it wasn't because you had some kind of epiphany and suddenly realized that you'd learned everything you needed to learn," it almost seems paradoxical, the caring one doesn't like to talk about her feelings.

"It would have looked bad. Foreman quits, House tells Chase he's ready, and here I am, nothing. Foreman immediately gets his own department, Chase could have had one if he wanted it, and I'm going to stay with House forever? Maybe I'll never be as good as them, maybe I was burnt out. If I had stayed, eventually House would have just forgotten about the Fellowship. I'd still be there right now, you guys would have been ignoring me instead of Foreman," she didn't have to say this with a hurt, kicked puppy quality to her voice, or maybe she did.

"We'd probably be ignoring you both, Foreman couldn't make it on the outside either."

"People think I'm annoying?"

"Can we just ignore everything I ever said to you during the filming of Survivor: Princeton?"

She went on a date with House. I still can't picture that in my mind. I can imagine portions of the 'courtship'. I can imagine House saying something and Allison obsessing over it. I can imagine Allison stubbornly locking on to something she saw as significant. I can imagine House puzzling over Allison and I can imagine her being utterly infatuated with him.

I need to get my own place. She wants to 'make a place for me in her life,' but sometimes I'll wake up and find that the shoes I left on the floor the night before have been cycled into her compulsively organized shoe caddy. If they're brown flats, they're with the brown flats and if they're black with chunky heels, then they're with the black chunky heeled shoes. I wonder what she's organizing against, what she's trying to keep together. God help me if I forget to turn the alarm on.

She's staring up at the ceiling and she looks human. I realize that I have this artificial divide in my life, between my work and who I am. I was always told that was healthy, but maybe that wasn't what House was looking for. Maybe he was looking for people who were utterly and completely themselves, people who couldn't alter their behavior, people who couldn't hide. I suddenly find myself feeling sorry for her, even though she's on the younger end of the scale for female department heads, she seems lost. It is almost like she knows how cancerous House's process was, but she still thinks about it wistfully, because she knows she'll never be that great again. I don't think Foreman ever realized that.

"You still want to have sex?"

She can't help but look cute and I know she hates that. Her shirt rides up a little bit and I can make out a strip of milky white flesh, almost the color of alabaster. Her abdomen is flat and well muscled, hard and tight when I drag my fingernails across it. Her skin is smooth and cool. I lean down and kiss her. She smells like vanilla shampoo and tastes like baking soda tooth paste. She's soft but then she isn't, or maybe she just looks soft. I run a fingernail over her hip bone and she shutters, she feels warmer once my hand dips below the waist band of her pajama pants. I like it when she's sweaty, a little flushed. I just want to keep her in bed all day.

She doesn't realize that my feelings have changed, or maybe she does and she just doesn't want to talk about it. I'll think she's utterly oblivious, and then I'll realize that my dry cleaning is labeled 'Amber' and hung up next to her work clothes, that she hates bad carbohydrates, yet the Rye bread I like is stocked in the refrigerator, and she gave me her alarm code, she seemed very proud of herself that day. She's making an effort. I can live with that.


End file.
